Long Story Short
Decision-making is a muscle — and you can build it across your whole org by teaching your team to ask themselves the hard questions before you have to. We put together Mike’s Decision-Making Toolkit to help you get started.
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Jess here.
I’ve always struggled with decision-making processes and rubrics and tools. I can understand how they can be useful AND it just feels like they’re kind of coming in after the fact. After the challenge. After the problem.
We bring in RAPID or RACI or one of the litany of others, and it feels like we’re just assigning who does what. But it’s not really getting at what’s underlying, which is — what are the things going INTO decisions? How do we trust them? How do we build a kind of shared language, muscles, processes to make better decisions, not just assign them?
I’ve seen a ton of decision making frameworks, but I also find it’s often about what needs to be true to greenlight a new project. Decisions like:
- How do we want to make this business decision?
- When do we sunset things?
- What are we aligned on as we make budget decisions?
These frameworks are used for a moment in time versus something that is used organizationally over and over and over.
Once you start to look at the downstream effects of a decision, you understand whether it’s actually worth saying yes.
I’ve been doing some light work with an org that’s been rolling out RAPID, with the really beautiful goal of developing folks and sharing power across the org. And, after two-ish years, it’s just not sticking. There are real concerns about trust and accountability and what it means, not to mention a whole additional layer of what can feel like “busy work” to fill these out:
- When do they need to use it? Every single decision?
- If someone is accountable for budget or equity, do they always have to be the decision-maker?
- When someone makes a decision that has ripple effects that affect others across the org, who is responsible?
What I’ve kept wanting — and what I think so many orgs are missing — is something that puts down on paper what’s actually at stake before a decision gets made. Something that asks:
- How did we get to this point of evaluating this decision?
- What are all of the implications of this decision?
- If we decide yes, how do we roll it out?
Something that helps all people in the org get better at making decisions. Folks that are great at decision-making are often bringing wisdom and perspective — they are automatically considering all the pieces and the players. How do we build this skill in others, especially folks early in their careers?
Thankfully, Helia Collective Member Mike Chae has something for that!
The person with the Decision Making Filter
I worked with Mike during my short stint at Playworks. In all of my career, he and I had some of the most honest and direct convos and, simultaneously, LAUGHED more together than almost everyone I had ever worked with. He comes across as dry and direct and logical — all of which are true — but at the same time, he has an incredible heart and mind and ability to not take himself or anyone else too seriously. He somehow makes even the hardest things feel more possible.
He self-describes as a “nonprofit lifer” and has held almost every job there is — fundraising, operations, culture, people. By somehow amassing all the experience needed to be such an incredible generalist is exactly what makes his diagnostics so three-dimensional. He enters into every role with a particular mindset: he won’t be there forever and he is replaceable so he’s always building something he can hand off. Guides. Frameworks. Cultural agreements. Any and everything that can and will outlast him.
When Mike was promoted to COO at Playworks and built out a new senior leadership team, he was (very understandably!) worried about what decisions were going to land on this newly forming team’s plate. The short answer — probably all of them! Everything from strategic pivots to budget requests to what color should the t-shirts be. He jokes that they were in danger of becoming “a kind of request line.” (Which, per usual, had me giggling).
So he built something that went SO much further than just a RACI or RAPID decision framework: a shared set of questions that helped everyone — including Mike himself — think through what they were actually deciding. The scope of it. Who it affected. What precedents it set. The equity implications. Whether it even needed to be decided at all.
He named it The Filter and paired it with an equitable decision-making guide that Playworks’ Equity Committee built with him.
This created the foundation for Playworks to not only make better decisions, but to understand them, to talk about them, to reflect on them, to help everyone improve their own decision-making and, as a result, collectively get better and better at making decisions over time.
The Key Takeaway
Most decision-making conversations focus on WHO decides — and that’s where they stop. RACI charts, RAPID, all the frameworks we know and love (and sometimes dread) — they’re fundamentally about assigning roles.
The Filter gets at something different: the WHAT and the WHY that have to happen before any of that. What are we actually deciding? Who does it affect? What does it mean for the org — now, and down the road? Is it even ours to decide?
When everyone in an org — not just the people at the top — have a shared way to think through those questions, something shifts. Decisions get made with more information, more clarity, and more equity. And when people understand how a decision was made — even if they don’t love the outcome — the conversation changes completely. As Mike puts it: “I still don’t like it, but it makes total sense.” That’s not a small thing. That’s what trust is built on.
If you’re looking for someone to help your org think through decision-making, culture, or operations, reach out to Mike at [email protected].
Mike’s Decision Making Filter
If you’re a “just give me the tool, I’m ready to get started” kind of person (aka Helia’s COO, Libby), Mike’s Better Decisions Toolkit includes three resources he built and used at Playworks:
- The Filter — the core set of questions to think through any decision, from scope and impact to equity and precedent
- Steps Toward Equitable Decision-Making — the companion guide the Equity committee built with Mike on what equitable decision-making actually looks like in practice
- The Decision Proposal Spreadsheet — the spreadsheet anyone in your org can fill out to bring something forward for discussion, so leadership always has the full picture before anything hits the agenda
If you’re a “tell me why this works” kind of person (aka our Founder, Jess), read on for the good stuff! Here’s what we’re going to cover:
- Step 1 — Get crystal clear on what you’re actually deciding (the problem statement that makes everything else possible)
- Step 2 — Understand the full scope and who it affects (think — team health, program impact, IT implications, all the pieces!)
- Step 3 — Look at what precedents we’re setting (who bears the brunt? what does this mean across the whole org?) — and how it intersects with what matters most: equity, values, impact
- Step 4 — Figure out who actually needs to be involved (does this need senior leadership? Who will this impact that we want to have a voice/share their perspective)
- Step 5 — Make the decision — and build in how you’ll reflect on it after
How these steps teach people to make better decisions
Step 1: Get crystal clear on what you’re actually deciding
This sounds obvious, AND it’s where most orgs skip ahead. Mike’s filter starts with two things: (1) the issue at hand AND (2) a proper problem statement.
Those are not the same thing. The issue might be “staff can’t access professional development.” The problem statement gets specific: “Site-based program staff are unable to take part in professional development opportunities due to their schedules and limited coverage. Given that future managers often start in these roles, how do we provide more opportunities for formal leadership development?”
That specificity matters — a lot. As Mike puts it: “When you’re in the thick of things, sometimes the problem is one thing, but once you actually start trying to map it out, it becomes something different — either much bigger or much smaller.”
Writing it down before you do anything else changes the whole game. It also means that if this needs to go to other people, they’re working from the same picture — not hearing the story retold five different ways.
When you’re in the thick of things, sometimes the problem is one thing, but once you actually start trying to map it out, it becomes something different — either much bigger or much smaller.
Step 2: Understand the full scope and who it affects
This is where the filter starts to do something most decision-making tools don’t — it asks you to think across the whole org before you go any further.
- Team health.
- Program impact.
- Financial implications.
- IT and systems.
- Policies that might be affected.
In the professional development example: opening up PD access for site-based staff sounds like a people win. AND it has program coverage implications, potential impact on customer contracts, HR policy changes, and communication processes that need to be built. None of those are reasons not to do it. But knowing they exist before you decide? That’s what makes the decision actually workable.
“Once you start to look at the downstream effects,” Mike says, “you understand whether it’s actually worth working on.”
Step 3: Look at what precedents you’re setting — and how it intersects with what matters most
Here’s the one that tends to surprise people. Mike’s filter asks: what precedents might this set?
In a 400-person org — or honestly, any org — this question can save you a lot of time and headaches. “Your one off situation,” as Mike puts it, “is not so one off anymore.” Multiply whatever you’re deciding by everyone it could affect, and suddenly the stakes get very clear.
Alongside precedents, the filter asks about equity:
- Who bears the brunt of this decision?
- Who’s most affected?
- Are the people impacted included in some way in vetting the solution?
- Does this align with our values and strategic objectives — or is it actually a mismatch that doesn’t need to be decided so much as simply not done?
That last one is underrated. As Mike says: “sometimes the best answer is — it doesn’t need to be decided. So much as we’re not doing this.” (Which, honestly, saves a lot of meeting time.)
Sometimes the best answer is — ‘it doesn’t need to be decided.‘ So much as we’re not doing this.
Step 4: Figure out who actually needs to be involved
Not everything needs to go to senior leadership. That’s kind of the point. The filter asks directly:
- Could another group decide this?
- Is there someone with specific expertise who should be presenting it?
- Who will be impacted that deserves a voice?
Mike’s filter helps sort decisions into their right home, which means senior leadership agendas stop being packed with 20 items when really there are two or three things that actually need to be there.
It also means that when something DOES go to senior leadership, it arrives with full context — the problem statement, the scope, the equity considerations, the recommended presenter, the background materials. No retelling. No surprises.
Step 5: Make the decision — and build in how you’ll reflect on it after
The filter closes with outcomes:
- What happened
- What was decided
- What the path forward looks like.
That might seem like a formality, but it’s what makes reflection possible. It’s what lets you go back and say: What did we miss? What didn’t we consider? What should we do differently next time?
As Mike puts it: “Gosh, we made a mistake. What part, what step did we mess up on? How do we correct that now — and in the future?”
That’s the muscle. Not getting every decision right. Getting better at making them — together, over time, with a shared record of how you got there.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
My favorite part of the interview was when Mike walked me through specific situations and how it played out. Three favorites:
When the Salary Structure Gets Tested
Mike has worked for national nonprofit organizations for years, from the supersized like the American Cancer Society to not quite as large, such as Playworks. If you work in a multi-state organization this one will probably feel familiar: a regional leader wants to post a role at a salary outside the organization’s established pay structure, usually lower, and the reasoning makes sense on the surface.
Local labor markets vary, from time to time. Budgets are tight. The team is stretched thin and there’s a real opening to add capacity at a lower cost. It feels like a smart thing to consider until you walk through the downstream effects.
Working through the filter brought a handful of things into focus:
Equity. Paying people in the same role, in the same geography, at different rates creates real disparities, even when the intent is just to be resourceful. When a salary structure already accounts for geographic differences, going around it raises fairness questions that don’t quietly resolve themselves.
Team health. People talk. When colleagues doing the same work find out they’re being paid differently, the damage to trust is hard to undo, and the focus shifts away from the mission. It could also lead to turnover, which hamstrings capacity even more.
Organizational values and integrity. One exception sets a precedent. Once salary ranges become something you can work around, they stop functioning as ranges. The inconsistencies that follow tend to create headaches for HR, legal, and leadership.
Legal exposure. Unstructured pay variation across roles and geographies can create real compliance risk, and in some cases, litigation.
Strategic durability. Salary ranges get updated as labor markets shift. Employees hired outside the structure don’t just stay there, they become a financial, communications, and equity matter to address.
What the filter made possible wasn’t just getting to the right answer. It brought everyone together, through the reasoning in a way that felt collaborative rather than top-down. The answer was still no. But it was a no that the whole group arrived at together, which made all the difference in how it landed.
Most decision-making conversations focus on WHO decides — and that’s where they stop.
The new department idea
Some staff came to Mike asking whether they could start a new department. Part genuine question, part — he’ll admit — a bit of an academic exercise, fishing for whether something new and different might be possible.
Instead of saying it wasn’t relevant or pushing it off, Mike and the group collectively walked through the filter as a conversation. “Who would be affected? If we did this, might we have eight or ten or twelve different department requests coming up every year?” Through the filter conversation, they were able to laugh together about needing a “department of department management.”
This was a beautiful way to turn what could have been frustration and hurt feelings into a learning moment. People earlier in their careers started to understand the magnitude of decisions at the org level — not because someone told them, but because they worked through it themselves. “It really showed people the difficulties of once you take on more responsibility in an organization — what that involves.”
The professional development fund
This one is all heart! Playworks had a professional development fund available to everyone, in theory. But site-based program delivery staff couldn’t actually use it. Their schedules weren’t flexible enough. They couldn’t just sign up for something on a Friday afternoon when they were in the field.
Running this through the filter made the full picture visible: the team health implications, the program coverage gaps, the equity lens — program staff often represent some of the most diverse cohorts in an org, and are frequently the pipeline for future leadership. “We want to do right by those people,” Mike says. “A lot of wonderful future leaders start at the very beginning, doing the work, with a full grasp of it.”
The filter led to clarity on what policy changes were needed AND that they would require — different staffing, better coverage, real access. This changed it from an unfunded mandate into something that actually delivered on its promise.
When to do this Yourself vs Bring Someone in
You can absolutely do this yourself! Mike is sharing exactly what his team at Playworks used and, in our opinion, it can absolutely be applied and used in any org of any size!
The filter is a spreadsheet, the equitable decision-making guide is very step-by-step – and the spreadsheet is easy to build from.
That said, it might be worth bringing someone in if:
- Decision-making as a whole is feeling hard — and while you want to change it, it’s not clear who might own that BIG scope of work or whether you have the foundation of trust you need
- You’re a new or growing leadership team trying to figure out how you want to make decisions together before things get complicated
- You’ve got a specific high-stakes decision coming up and want a thought partner to help you think through the full picture
- There is an opportunity to build trust and having a third party can help you leverage this moment
Connect with Mike!
Try This Yourself
Mike’s Decision-Making Toolkit
- The Filter — Mike’s core spreadsheet for thinking through any decision: scope, impact, equity, precedent, and who needs to be involved
- Steps Toward Equitable Decision-Making — the step-by-step guide the Equity committee built with Mike on what equitable decision-making actually looks like in practice
- The Decision Proposal Spreadsheet — the spreadsheet anyone in your org can fill out to bring something forward for leadership discussion
Recommended:
- Mike’s thinking was sharpened through conversations with a colleague at the Center for Creative Leadership — worth exploring if you want to go deeper
- What to Make of a Life by Jim Collins — came up in our conversation; his thinking on what you’re “encoded for” resonates deeply with everything Mike shared here
Questions to Sit With
- Who gets to make decisions in your org — about what? Why? How might you want to tighten OR expand this?
- Think about the last decision that didn’t land well — can you clearly understand what went wrong and what to do differently next time?
- Is there a difference in how decisions get made at the top of your org versus further down? What would it look like to close that gap?
- When someone in your org has an idea or concern, is there a clear path for bringing it forward? Or does it depend on who you know?
- Where are you spending the most meeting time relitigating things? What might a shared filter free up?
Not sure Mike‘s the right fit? Talk to Helia directly!
This article comes from a coffee chat with Mike Chae in April 2025. These conversations form the heart of the Helia Library — because we’ve learned the most from doing and from talking with other doers willing to share their wisdom. We don’t need to start from blank pages or do everything alone.
As always, take what’s helpful, leave what’s not, and make it your own.
About Mike
Mike Chae is a nonprofit lifer who has held or overseen almost every job there is — fundraising, operations, culture, people, finance, innovation. He goes into every role knowing he won’t be there forever, and with the intent to build enduring systems and people. Somehow both the most logical person in the room AND genuinely, deeply funny — which makes even the hardest things feel more possible.
If you’re looking for someone to help your org think through decision-making, culture, or operations, or look further down the road, reach out to Mike.
